Yuri Slezkine in the new journal Equator:
I grew up in Moscow, in a succession of communal apartments. The first book I learnt by heart (according to my father, who kept track and took pictures) was Ram the Baby Elephant, published in 1959, when I turned three. When Ram was born, all the animals came to say hello. The bear played the double bass, the giraffe danced the Russian squat dance, the camel brought a huge pacifier, the hippo got stuck in the doorway, and the rhino claimed to have walked “all the way from the Ganges”.
New books introduced more characters: a cast of local heroes, led by the wolf, the fox and the hare, and a large selection of jungle dwellers, including Bagheera, Baloo, and, from a much thicker book, the lion, the bull and two jackals named Dimanaka and Karataka.
Soon, animals – foreign, domestic and stuffed (in 1969 Winnie-the-Pooh was reborn as a popular Soviet cartoon character, Vinni Pukh) – were joined by mostly human orphans, robbers, soldiers, princesses, emperors and stargazers. Things happened once upon a time, in faraway lands. Fools, shepherds and youngest sons usually won. Commercial transactions involved ducats, thalers, guineas, sovereigns, doubloons and, most memorably, rupees, which were related to rubles, but could buy magic carpets and dancing cobras.
The books of my adolescence came with specific realms, names and uniforms. At the centre lay the Russian noble estate, surrounded by an overgrown park with a lily-covered pond, populated by old generals, eternal students, French governors, German tutors and a girl with an open book. It existed in a mythic space, unnamed and unchanging, troubled but safely landlocked.
More here.
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